DataDirect Networks > Case Studies > ACCELERATE: LIFE SCIENCES - University of Miami’s Center for Computational Science Correlates Viruses with Gastrointestinal Cancers for The Cancer Genome Atlas 400% Faster Using DDN Storage

ACCELERATE: LIFE SCIENCES - University of Miami’s Center for Computational Science Correlates Viruses with Gastrointestinal Cancers for The Cancer Genome Atlas 400% Faster Using DDN Storage

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

DDN GRIDScaler®
GS12K™ scale-out appliance
IBM® GPFS™ parallel file system

Tech Stack

High Performance Computing (HPC)
Next-Generation Sequencing
Data Analytics

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Innovation Output

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics

Applicable Industries

Healthcare & Hospitals
Life Sciences
Education

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

The University of Miami maintains one of the largest centralized, academic, cyber infrastructures in the country, which is integral to addressing major scientific challenges and solving many of today's most challenging problems. At its Center for Computational Science (CCS), more than 2,000 researchers, faculty, staff and students across multiple disciplines collaborate on diverse and interdisciplinary projects requiring high performance computing (HPC) resources. The Center provides hardware, software development and analytics expertise to support a variety of research areas, including genomics, computational biology, marine ecosystems, ocean modeling, climate and meteorology, computational economics, computational fluid dynamics as well as social systems informatics. According to Dr. Nicholas Tsinoremas, director of the Center for Computational Science at the University of Miami as well as a professor of medicine, computer science and health informatics, the center was founded on the premise that data drives discovery. Therefore, keeping pace with data growth is of paramount importance.

The Challenge

The Center for Computational Science (CCS) at the University of Miami is one of the largest centralized, academic, cyber infrastructures in the country. It supports over 2,000 researchers, faculty, staff, and students across multiple disciplines on diverse and interdisciplinary projects requiring high performance computing (HPC) resources. The center's guiding principle is to manage the entire data lifecycle as seamlessly as possible to streamline research workflow. However, the center faced several challenges. The diverse, interdisciplinary research projects required massive compute and storage power as well as integrated data lifecycle movement and management. The explosion of next-generation sequencing had a major impact on compute and storage demands, as it’s now possible to produce more and larger datasets, which often create processing bottlenecks. The heavy I/O required to create four billion reads from one genome in a couple of days only intensifies when the data from the reads needs to be managed and analyzed. The center needed a powerful file system that was flexible enough to handle very large parallel jobs as well as smaller, shorter serial jobs.

The Solution

The center chose an end-to-end, high performance DDN GRIDScaler® solution featuring a GS12K™ scale-out appliance with an embedded IBM® GPFS™ parallel file system. The ideal storage solution for CCS would provide a single platform for both high-throughput genomics and highly interactive research collaboration. The center needed to accommodate its entire data lifecycle, so users didn’t have to deal directly with a lot of data movement. DDN Storage was superior to competing storage platforms with its ability to leverage one robust, easily managed platform for ensuring high performance, simplified collaboration and accelerated data analytics. DDN’s GS12K scale-out file storage appliance with one petabyte of storage was best suited for meeting the university’s growing IOPS and bandwidth requirements while ensuring extremely fast application performance. Moreover, the embedded GPFS™ parallel file system eliminated the need to purchase and manage external servers, network adapters and switches.

Operational Impact

Links between certain viruses and gastrointestinal cancers discovered with computation not possible before.
With DDN’s high performance I/O, CCS has reduced genomics compute and analysis time.
The ability to meet varied research workflow demands enables CCS to accelerate data analysis and speed scientific discoveries.
High performance storage and transparent data movement lets CCS scale storage without adding complexity.
Centralized storage with an embedded file system makes it easy to add storage where needed—in the high performance, high-transaction or slower storage pools—and then manage it all through a single pane of glass.

Quantitative Benefit